Are you and your company an influencer? At no time in history has it been so easy and effective to create a personal brand. Knowing how to do that and what social platforms can help you do it better is the topic of this week’s podcast.

Speaker 1:

0:00

Welcome to make the logo bigger. We're a strategy first company, right, so as everyone should be, I mean you got to start with your objective and then kind of work your way backwards from there. The podcast that takes you behind the scenes of a marketing agency conscience getting so much more expensive. It just got to figure out more economical ways to provide that service to clients. Come two guys that get paid to do this stuff on a daily basis. People behind the scenes type stuff, they want to see how you work. You know, they want to know more about your process, so be open and honest. Here's your host, no rice. Usually the best ideas don't actually sit within where you are. They're usually come from somewhere else, and Mike, Carol, you need to design first and then create content to the design and now the obligatory legal disclosure. Bill Rice and Mike Carol worked for Kalydeco, a marketing design agency. All opinions expressed by bill and Mike are definitely the opinions of Kalydeco opinions expressed by guests at this podcast. Well, they could be right or wrong. Who knows? This podcast is for informational purposes and has a reasonable probability of making your marketing better. And now this week's episode.:

Speaker 2:

1:06

Hey, welcome to make the logo bigger with Kalydeco. This is bill and I got Mike here. Hey Mike. Hey everybody. I'm doing pretty good vr. How are you? Excellent. Excellent. We're going to talk about growing a following and becoming influential online. It feels like twitter's back and now everybody's starting to talk about followings and influencers again and again talked to I think last week about rand fishkins kind of going down a whole new social influencer kind of tool thing. We don't know what he's actually cooking up there, but it's kind of interesting. But before we jump into that, um, this is a topic that we talked about all the time and I wanted to kind of get your thoughts and kind of put it in front of our audience, but how important curiosity is to the whole marketing process and how frustrating it can be when you either hook into an agency or maybe even hire somebody that you think is a creative marketing type and they just totally lack curiosity. So.:

Speaker 3:

2:06

Well, I think it's a, it's a double edged sword, right? So there are there, you know, there's a certain level of curiosity wanting all your employees. I don't care what kind of company you're running is this the ability and slash or at least not even the ability to be our events, like the need to want to solve a problem. Right. When I was in, um, when I worked in politics, one of my very early mentors said something to me, the two things to me, one that has absolutely zero relevance, so we'll skip that. And then the second thing that he said to me that kind of stuck with me all these years, he said one day I came into his office with a problem and he stopped me and he said, don't do that. I said, don't. I said don't do what? And he said, don't bring me problems. Bring me a solution. Like, show me that you've taken the time to think about it even if your solution is like off the wall, crazy or might not even work. Like at least I know that you spent 15 minutes:

Speaker 4:

3:00

thinking about that problem. You were trying to solve and then tried to solve it and then we can work on a solution together. It's something that's stuck with me because as a leader here at Kalydeco, I say the same thing to our folks, which is like, hey, if you run into a challenge like trying to come up with a solution and then bring me the challenge and your solution, don't just drop a problem in my lap. Um, and I think that speaks to curiosity, right? Which is like if you have a need to solve problems, your curiosity, you should, should drive you to want to figure out what that problem is and then try to create a solution for it. So if you are interviewing somebody or something like that and they just don't have the. It's an intangible quality. It's not something you can teach. It's not something that you can say even something you can even breed into your employees or anything like that. It's just one, it exists or, or, or it doesn't end to tell you the truth. I have no idea how to detect it and somebody will listen.:

Speaker 2:

3:48

I think it's kind of frustrating too because the tools have gotten so much better. I mean, one of the, the routine gags around here is somebody asks if you figure something out or whatever. Um, and we fire in the, let me Google that for you. And if you haven't played with this website, you gotta you gotta do that. I mean, you've got Google at your fingertips. Um, I'll, I'll never forget one of my first jobs after coming out of the military is kind of a perfect example of this. So I was transitioning out of the military into civilian a job and that transition is always a little bit weird because I'm in the military, kind of expects a certain level of just kind of figuring it out and charging forward and that sort of thing. And um, but at the same time there's a lot of structure and so your job is well defined and that sort of thing.:

Speaker 2:

4:35

Well, anyway, I landed this position with this company and I walk in there the first day, um, as was often the case in my early careers are probably oversold myself a little bit. So I walk into this, uh, this lab environment and this guy was working on, I'm looking in these databases and pulling out these patterns and actually programming and he's like, okay, like I'm getting ready to switch off this project. This was actually kind of a place where people were in a holding pen waiting for their clearances to come through. He's like, I'm getting ready to switch over to a real project and now like, this is, this is yours to carry on as I leave. So he was literally leaving the next day. He's like, Oh, I started here, I use Pearl. You probably know Pearl to the program. That was our programming language. And I was like, sure, yeah, no problem.:

Speaker 2:

5:22

I got a d. I literally went to the Barnes nobles reporters, I don't remember which one and got a pearl book that, that night. So there was no place to Google really. I mean Google wasn't a thing at this point. This is like two, this was 1997, 98. So I had to go to the bookstore, I got the book and I didn't even have a computer to kind of try this on. I literally read through the book and I'm in the next couple of days, figured out enough to carry the project forward and deliver it. But like I long for somebody that's just like, oh crap, like somebody figured this out. It can't be that hard and just goes in and googles. It, grabs a book.:

Speaker 3:

6:01

Nobody taught you to do that. Right? Like the very first press conference I ever ran, like the very first earned media event that I can take responsibility for when I was working as a political operative. You know, I spent, um, God, I can't remember exactly what the issue is. It doesn't matter necessarily, but I spent a full day pouring over Illinois health facilities, planning board bylaws, uh, just to see because my, my thought was they were going to close this hospital in a, in a neighborhood and they didn't want to close the hospital. And so someone came to me and said, what can we actually do about that? And the answer to that question is probably nothing. Our candidate wasn't an office yet and you know, couldn't make any decisions or influence policy on your particular way, but, but after about four hours reading through these crazy bylaws, I figured out that any citizen, any Cook County citizen can call a board meeting of the Facilities Planning Board to review the closing of any hospital.:

Speaker 3:

6:54

And so that's what we did, you know. But again, to your point and you know, here you are kind of like, it sounds like we're self aggrandizement. That's not the, that's not the case. I don't know where along the way someone beat it into me or beat it into you or however we can about it, that like, look, it's upon, it's your responsibility to solve, solve a problem. I just don't see that in a lot of employees today. And particularly, you know, sometimes whether it's clients or the people on our own team. Yeah. The default position is just to ask somebody else who knows as opposed to teaching yourself something. And that's dangerous.:

Speaker 2:

7:31

Well, no. And that's also a frustrating point because it takes a lot of time. All right. I see a lot of people and we work with some folks and even some of our own team members that want you to literally sit down and show them every step instead of just saying, Hey, I want you to accomplish this, I want to give you an end result that I'm looking for and then I want you to figure out the details in between or teach yourself. Or sometimes there's a, there's a time for sure to sit down and, and Kinda teach somebody side by side. But anymore it's harder and harder to do that. So anyway,:

Speaker 3:

8:02

after the mistake though, right? I mean because the only thing that ever teaches you anything is failure and mistakes. Totally. So yeah. So I mean it also is incumbent upon, I think you as a leader, if you're a leader of your team, your marketing team or whatever else you know, to technically give your folks enough rope a so they can make their own mistakes and then don't eat their lunch for it. Like if you ask someone to go do this stuff, you also have to have a proper attitude as a leader. I think that's important.:

Speaker 2:

8:26

Totally. Totally agree. Well, we could go deeper in that. We probably will on, on a future one, but let's switch into our main topic. So like I said a little bit in the welcome. It seems like twitter is kind of getting a new legs here and maybe lease on life and people are sort of starting to pile in there and um, and then at the same time facebook is having to make some adjustments. Obviously they've come full into the media headlights with the all the Russian stuff and politics and all that kind of stuff. So actually having to sort of adjust their platform a little bit, um, to maybe, you know, be more adjusted towards kind of friends and family and that sort of thing. And then you've got linkedin, which seems to be sort of aggressively. I'm working on trying to have a content angle and being a, an influence or kind of platform and everything.:

Speaker 2:

9:18

So it's all of this confluence of events is kinda thrown us into this, this question about how do we, how do we grow followings, how do you become influential online? And so I wanted to kind of take us through, um, a few of the key points of like, how do you do that? Um, and so, uh, so let's talk through that a little bit. Obviously. First and foremost, it seems like we always come back to this. We say content is king and everybody wants to take that away. But at the end of the day, especially online, it's all linked to content. At some point you got to get somebody's attention and so creating interesting content has got to be the first step and that is:

Speaker 3:

9:57

think to your point. Yeah, I mean it used to be used to be, we're creating content in and of itself was enough because there weren't enough people creating enough content. And if you kind of created, you know, to a, I will call a minimum quality, like almost an mvp of content, right? Like you're sort of minimum viable content product, which is your basic 500 word blog article. If you did that consistently and it was seo driven, then you could acquire an audience, you know, shortly are, you know, in, in reasonably short order,:

Speaker 2:

10:28

we're just frame off or even just frame off your little corner of the market because everybody wasn't writing about everything, right?:

Speaker 3:

10:35

No, exactly. And so, and then I think, you know, for us, by the way, and this was almost five years ago, we got a taste of trying to. I've had the taste both of, of entering into a highly competitive concept marketplace and then being a part of creating a content marketplace. It's super competitive. The one I'm referring to is the first one is personal finance, right? So at the beginning, and we just had to create enough articles that were, you know, uh, gave some really basic advice and kind of aggregated some information and whatever else. And that was great. Um, and now we're entering back into that same marketplace by the way, which is now highly competitive. And so now the name of the game, like you said, it's actually interesting content that content has to be valuable. And when I say valuable, I don't mean like, oh, it's a listicle. Listicle still work by the way. I mean top 10 ways to do this. One hundred and one ways to do that. Whatever the listicle is, but if your content doesn't have a voice to it, you know, it doesn't have some sort of entertainment value and educational value and like doesn't drive your, your reader or your audience through it. Like it's not going to work. People are going to bounce right out of it. And we're seeing a lot of that.:

Speaker 2:

11:37

Right? And even packaging. I want to talk a little bit about packaging and I think, uh, this is also where your creativity comes into play. It has to be packaged well and people have to be able to consume it. And even more so than like actual, like read it or listened to it or watch it. A sort of quality, a review of those things. It's just got to kind of look a peeling, right? I mean, so if you're going to do a video, it's got to have a good title. It's maybe you gotta have some, some bumpers and some titles to it and that kind of stuff. Obviously content, the actual text piece of that, a genre or whatever is a huge thing. I can't tell you the number, like dense articles I see. That's just like a big block of text and can't be scanned.:

Speaker 2:

12:22

Um, and you see some innovation here, which is kind of interesting. One guy wanted to bring up a josh effector, I think, uh, I may mispronounce his name, but he's bad ass marketer and you see him on Linkedin. He actually caused quite a controversy on linkedin because he had created this format on linkedin that was a clever on kind of two fronts. One, uh, it was more like poetry. So it was, it was, it was very long and narrow. The all the sentence fragments, which is the other part that was a little controversial. Um, we're, we're very narrow, right? And then because of that and the way that he did it, instead of doing a post, he actually did, I can't remember what they, they call it, but, uh, an update, I think it actually collapsed. And so you saw like a teaser one, two lines of again, something that was more like poetry and then you would, it would force you to open it to get the rest.:

Speaker 2:

13:15

So he put a teaser, you would be forced to open it and you get this big long thing. Then people started actually using it on twitter because they found out if twitter, if you do line returns, you could make this really long tweet even though it's within the character limit still. And uh, and so people were actually pissed at him because they're like, oh, like you're wasting our time. You're like, you know, making us open this thing. And it was almost like they had noticed it and they had engaged with him, um, and had a little bit of a negative reaction. But, uh, but it worked for him. Like he got all kinds of attention and it actually logically made sense because his point is, the reason he came to that format is he's like, dude, everybody's reading this on their phone and so they can't read or they don't want to read or they're not inclined to read something like a book which are complete sentences and paragraphs.:

Speaker 2:

14:03

They want to just, they're scanning through anyway. So all he did was take out all the words that people would normally ignore when they're scanning through on their phone, which is what they're doing with linkedin or facebook or twitter and created a new format for it. And so I thought that was super genius. The other guy who is a master of a sort of packaging it well and changing it up by the way. Um, and then everybody follows him is Gary Vee or Gary Vaynerchuk? He's just a master. Especially with video. You'll see him, you know, switch it up all the time. And if you look on facebook, you could see him experiment. And in plain with the packaging, I'm his latest one that I think is genius is he actually put the title, a sort of a design over a moving video so it actually looks like an image at first, then the video starts moving, but the actual title package stays stagnant. So you get this cool. Yeah. So you get the whole message in the image per se, but it's actually a video that's moving through because obviously you realize nobody turns her sound on. So. So packaging is a super important thing. Um, and then, um, and then so any thoughts on packaging or anything cool you've seen in that, in that realm?:

Speaker 3:

15:15

Well, I think the, I think when it comes to packaging, I think people get the misconception that you need, okay now I need a video department now need graphic design or whatever else. And totally I would highly encourage people to go out and look to me and to, to us at Galactico any digital marketing tactic, whether it's the type of content, the packaging you're giving away, it's all a test, right? So, so don't break the bank it, there's plenty of tools out there to, you know, like a canva or unsplash or I mean to get the kind of design assets that you need. There's even video stuff out there. I mean, you know, really cheap video companies. It'll take raw footage of yours and edit together and interesting way for like less than $500 so you don't have to break the bank on quote unquote professional tools and slash or actual professionals to test a content strategy.:

Speaker 3:

16:01

So, you know, I suppose the, again, I don't use the phrase again, it's another double edge sword, right? Which is like, you don't want to spend so much time in production that you slow down on the amount of content you're creating. You also don't want to spend no time on production. So that's the content you're creating has no visual and slash or you know, entertainment value to it. So it's a, it's a fine line to walk, but like try to do some research. Speaking of doing research by the way, Google it. Uh, and you will and you will find a bunch of different tools that will help anyone who doesn't know how to use illustrator or doesn't know how to use final cut pro or whatever else. Create good content, whether you know, multimedia content as long as you have the time and the focus to actually, you know, Cordova put words to paper.:

Speaker 3:

16:42

I mean, that's, that's the most important part. Even look at what we're doing here with, you know, with the podcasts, right. So, you know, Bill and I, were we using, we're using zencaster. It's just phil and I were not audio files. We don't understand. I don't know how to edit audio and we've managed to create a podcast, you know, very simply we'll production value go up, we'll sure if you guys really like it, we're going to go find an audio guy and you know, do some cooler stuff with music and you know, and whatever else. But until that day comes, we've got the tools at our disposal to go ahead and test that content strategy out. So, I mean that would be my, my point there. I think.:

Speaker 2:

17:12

Totally. And kind of locking into that and just rolling into the next thing is as you are testing, you kind of get it, give it a fair run. And so especially as the market gets more crowded and noisier patients is like a premium a part of, of growing that following you got to be patient and you've got to be rock solid and disciplined about the consistency and frequency. So even as we test the podcasts, we've got an extended, you know, goal and timeline where our expectations are not that the first one's going to like light up. It's really what's going to happen over the first six months. So creating an, an honest timeline with yourself that has sort of patients built into it I think is super critical on the, uh, you know, trying to gain an audience or grow an audience.:

Speaker 3:

17:58

Oh yeah. I mean, I had a writer buddy of mine not too long ago, um, you know, he saw me starting to publish on medium and he called me up and he said, oh, so you think medium is a thing? Now we talk every once in a while. He's a freelance writer, so about marketing strategy and that kind of stuff. And I said, yeah, it's always been a thing. I said I'm just going to give it its fair shake. Um, and so I've committed to kind of writing as many blog posts as I can and the same timeline over the next six months and see what it got me and he, his response to me, he wrote his first article and he said it to me and he's like, what do you think the audience will think about it? To which I responded, who cares, so just published.:

Speaker 3:

18:31

So I guess we're kind of contradicting ourselves in some ways, but my point to him was simply we'll publish it and then publish another one and then publish another one and then publish another one. And then once you've written 50 medium articles, if you're not getting any traction, like, okay, we gotta take a look at your, you know, your strategy or the types of articles you're reading. Maybe it's just your headline writing. I mean, the, the inches you need in the digital space are so like myriad, right? I mean, it could be any number of little tiny things that is going to push you over the edge to hit that tipping point. That to bill's point, you got to take the time, you got to be patient with it, and then once you start reexamining your strategy, they're trying to make it work better. Take it in really small chunks, like don't automatically assume it's like, oh, I'm the worst writer in the world, are like, nobody wants to listen to my content. Literally could be a headline problem. Like you're just not writing good headlines and that's why nobody's clicking. I mean, it can be that simple,:

Speaker 2:

19:21

right? I think you gave really good advice. I mean, that's Kinda what you got to kind of figure out as you, as you go through this process is actually put it out there and figure out what the audience starts to react to and learn over time. Because if you don't, if you don't do that, um, I, I can't tell you the number of times where like, oh yeah, this content is really gonna. It's gonna light up and these people are going to be interested in. I did a lot of research, I figured out the right key words, I figured out what people are paying attention, I put it in a dead, you know, dead air, and then all of a sudden I put something out of a whim and I throw it out there and then all of a sudden it just lights up. Right? And so, um, you really got to that, that consistency and frequency, I can't tell you how important that is to build a following, getting your voice right and getting that right kind of a tempo to it. So we're going to break the segment there and we'll come back in a minute.:

Speaker 1:

20:13

You're listening to collide, goes make the logo bigger podcast. You can find this on the web at [inaudible] dot com. K A L C O.com. Now, back to the show.:

Speaker 2:

20:28

All right, so Mike, let's, let's talk about challenges and rabbit holes this week. Um, I'll jump in here kind of first and I think it ties into what you're going to talk about a little bit. Um, I'll kind of wrap it together, but project management is something that we've been kind of wrestling around with here internally at Kalydeco, kind of figuring out the right way to do that. Uh, we've talked about this before where, uh, got some virtual virtual aspects to our company. Some of our people are in different locations. Um, and so we've played with base camp, we, which we use now we use slack. We're kind of talking about some new stuff. So talk to me a little bit about what we're thinking there and um, and why we're even kind of diving into this problem set as a little bit of a distraction. Actually,:

Speaker 3:

21:13

that's a terrible distraction because once you've, um, and I'll talk a little bit more about this in a second, but once you've adopted any type of project management system, even if it's just like a spreadsheet. So, you know, I went to my brother's place of business. You're in is a sign shop and like they've managed to hook up our spreadsheet that literally plays, when I say plays and displays on a huge monitor in their print shop. So people from the sales team and are literally like, it's a google doc, you know, and so, and actually I was, I was impressed in the sense that it's super simple and very clever, but my point to him was I was like, wow, I was like, there's lots of systems your by the way like would organize that and prioritize that because you can constantly see them like messing around with the order of things and it doesn't, doesn't track time or anything like fulfillment, like what projects or what things need to be printed.:

Speaker 3:

21:59

Exactly. And like when they're due and whatever else. But of course the google sheet doesn't like account for problems in their process or allow the, you know, doesn't really allow the print shop folks like the production folks to report back to the salespeople so they can talk to clients appropriately. So, you know. So anyway, my point being is that even if you, once you've adopted any system, no matter how simple or how rudimentary, no matter how terrible, in fact, um, it becomes a serious distraction for the company at large to go ahead and change that process. So when you make the decision to either try a new and here's the second challenge with that, right? So if you make the decision to try a new project management system, the testing of it is, is almost an impossibility, right? Because like, that'll, that'll disrupt your entire workflow.:

Speaker 3:

22:42

And that's the problem we're having now. So we use base camp, you know, inside of Kalydeco and it's worked really well for us for almost, I mean, almost five years now, I guess. So a long time ago we made the conscious decision to like use it and everybody got a motto, everybody base camps and so it keeps good track of what we're doing, what it doesn't do as well as we would like and we might not even be leveraging its features correctly, which you pointed out to me the other day. I, my dad, um, it does not help us manage planned out time. So as we make this transition, which we talked about a lot from, from a, a full service digital marketing agency to a more focused web design and development shop, uh, you know, were doing much bigger projects that take much more time and it's happening to us as these projects are stacking up with all of our other agency partners and it's really jamming us up and base camp doesn't give us a good like Gantt chart visualization of how, of resource allocation:

Speaker 2:

23:35

resources. I think that's a huge piece, right? It's like what resources are full and what, what are, you know, have some spare capacity and yet nothing really. I mean maybe you've looked at a couple but a basic camp falls down on that. I think a lot of project management, it's like really to figure out like where do you have capacity and where are you running into trouble? And um, yeah. And they do.:

Speaker 4:

23:58

You mentioned that in your notes. Show notes here. Rick is the only one that we found that seems super, not the only one, but it seems to provide that in the best way possible. The other problem with any sort of resource management of course, is that on the front end it requires a lot of quote unquote like project management data entry. So they get a balance. You know when it comes to any project management system, you had a balance like how big is your team, right? If you have dedicated project managers that can spend the time to go ahead and be in the project management system on a regular basis and spend the time doing that type of data entry, then maybe a, a data heavy, you know what I mean? Complicated project management system. It's good for you because the more data you put into the larger things, the more it can tell you about resource management, about time, about, you know, when stuff is due about, uh, you know, even time tracking or anything like that.:

Speaker 4:

24:47

Or even you could even tie it in with like your quickbooks and stuff like that. So, so the, so you can see what's most profitable or what's taking you longer with so on and so forth. But the point of the whole thing is that like if you, you definitely need a project management system, if you're, if you're asking the question, do I need a project management system, you're, you're already past the event horizon, right? Like you're, you're, you're sucked into the black hole already, so, so you might as well find one and then once you do that, which is what I wanted to talk about, is like how do you drive that adoption within your team? Because if you don't get people to use it, then it just sits there and then you've got people working in an old system and a new system and then all hell is going to break loose.:

Speaker 2:

25:26

No, there's no gentle switchover and I think software companies rely on this, right? What does, what does that, that switching costs is, is usually they kind of build it in such a way that it's, it's almost insurmountable. So yeah, you do almost have to kind of rip the bandaid off so to speak, and just flip over and drop everything from the last place and not really trying to migrate any sort of casual way.:

Speaker 4:

25:48

I appreciate it was impossible to do that, but some of the software companies now, and this isn't a project management system, a crm, what I noticed the other day, it's actually an anarbor company. Um, anyway, they are a crm and so now they have like a button inside of their platform that says, migrate me from salesforce. They created an integration to go right after salesforce and all you have to do is click that button, give the authorization. I don't know how salesforce, let them like create this thing. I mean they were find out about they're going to shut it down that API.:

Speaker 2:

26:22

Well, it seems like a page. I remember back in the olden days, like hotmail did that they had a one button click to suck everything over from Yahoo and then I think they got that handed to them. [inaudible] Gmail did the same thing. So I remember using that a couple times as I transitioned over to smell. But that's, that's a blast from the past actually. It's interesting they did that.:

Speaker 4:

26:43

Yeah. Clever and the,:

Speaker 2:

26:44

you know, so. So there's that angle of the software platform with and allowing you to, to transfer things. I've seen none of that by the way in the project management realm. So I would love it if Ryan was like, oh, just click here and import all your base camp projects and like there'll be, there'll be clean up to do for sure. Um, but you know, you'll be able to, you know, because right now what we're wrestling with is like, okay, if we wanted to make the switch, when do we make the switch? Like how do we clean up all of our old tasks and base camp and I can tell you right now what's going to end up happening bar is that like we're going to make the switch and I'm going to have to spend a full 72 hours. Like, like you did the last time by the way.:

Speaker 2:

27:18

Uh, just putting everything in myself and that's the pain you got to go through. I think that's okay. I mean, but once you do it, like you have to make it law inside of your organization. If, if someone's not using the platform, and I don't mean to be so extreme, but then they should be fired because if you don't get everyone working on the same, like to the tune of the same drummer when it comes to project management, it'll collapse your company quick if you're particularly if you're a services company, you know, or you have to deliver anything on a timely basis. I mean, if you sell t shirts, I don't know if it really matters, but fall through the cracks. There's too much coordination and the services way too much. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So cool. Let's, uh, let's switch over to hottest trends topics this week. Marketing.:

Speaker 4:

28:04

Well, you're going to love this, right? Because I'm going to contradict something you said earlier. So, um, so twitter is dead, uh, disagreed. They didn't grow their user base in 2017. Do you know that it's changing. They're getting, they're getting a little blip.:

Speaker 2:

28:18

The last couple of reportings, they're actually making a little move on there, but yeah, I did. I didn't know that. I'm actually a stockholder, so I hear these kinds of things.:

Speaker 4:

28:26

But. So. So anyway, so to me, I've never been a big twitter user, right? So to me the ad platform and launch was never very valuable, although in fairness we didn't test it that much as an agency. I didn't find a lot of, we didn't have a lot of clients who like, you're like, oh, twitter's going to be a great channel for that particular topic or that product or, or whatever else. So. So I'm, uh, I, I will admit my own bias and like I'm just not a fan of twitter. It's almost too fast and too much nonsense. Like for me to pay attention to bill loves it and for good reason I think. But what do you like about, what do you like about it? I mean, you know, from a marketing perspective, not just a, you know, a use perspective.:

Speaker 2:

29:04

Yeah, I mean from, um, I mean I think early on I liked it because there wasn't actually a lot of noise on it. Early on there was, you know, the, the earliest memories I have of twitter getting on there, you actually knew the people like you were following, interacting with, and then they kind of really opened up a, the system in such a way that you could really kind of game it and build up followers and we know that's a big ego thing. And so, um, so I, I think they've been recovering from that and also some of their, uh, sort of, uh, evangelical, uh, approaches to certain things or dogmatic, probably not evangelical dogmatic approaches to certain, uh, sort of constraints in their system. And so, um, so as far as the kind of the marketing aspect, I don't think, and this is where I don't think it's dead because I think they're finally doing what they needed to do to make the marketing, uh, and they ad platform work appropriately is, is really, um, the, the content was as good as the audience that you created and you followed.:

Speaker 2:

30:03

So if you were falling smart people, if you're following interesting people, then you are getting some value out of that. A perfect example, this stocktwits, uh, was built on this, which is, you know, you follow a bunch of smart guys in the market or the trade stocks and as a result you get some value back from that because you get insight and you get kind of their spin on things. And actually there was a whole platform that, that, that I still am on and it's pretty powerful. Um, that kinda organizes that community, but you had to do that yourself. Um, and so there was no content in the platform that would potentially drive the advertising engine. And so now over the last couple of years as they've kind of Dorsey's come back into it, I think they're trying to, to figure out their role and putting, you know, high quality content on the platform.:

Speaker 2:

30:56

So now you've got partnerships with an outsell, you've got movie stuff, you've got the second screen that they're really kind of leaning into walking dead. I mean, whenever I watched the walking dead, I've always got twitter up because I'm running a second screen and listening to all the crazy fans there and kind of their reaction to things. Or there, um, you know, what they think's going to happen next and stuff so, so I think they're starting to get some legs there, but there's definitely a lot of work to be done for sure. They're not out of the woods. That's, that's a, that's a given. So:

Speaker 4:

31:24

what was that thing we used to use all the time? Um, you know, uh, was working for quizzle. That was great. It was like a, I care about what people called it. A little twitter, twitter, twitter chat or twitter chats. Tweet chats. Yeah, right. Where you could get a collection of people and you'd actually, it would be live. It was actually the early version of something like facebook live. Right. Which totally did not exist. And actually, so when I say that it worked really well at the time. So like I used to find a real utility in twitter for, for many of our clients. I guess I haven't, I haven't found it in recent time to be as advantageous. Although I will say nowhere on the social web are, they're funnier people that on twitter while. Yeah, it's definitely breeds sarcasm and snark and everything else, but it's funny you mentioned that the tweet chat sort of paradigm because it still exist around there and I think, I:

Speaker 2:

32:17

think this is probably one of their weaknesses, but also one of the things that kind of true twitter purest love about the platform is the communities. It was really kind of a flexible platform where the communities could build their own environments to, to gain value in tweet chat was one of those examples where they kind of get together and then they, they shaped and hacked together their own sort of mechanism of a facebook live or having an open discussion webinar or whatever you want. You know, you'd have a few questions and everybody would jump in and they were all kind of hashtags. Even the Hashtag itself was a hack by a gentleman. I can't remember his name right now, but I'm super smart guys, vc now. But um, but he, that was his way to track the topics he wanted. And you could because twitter was so sort of, it didn't, it was so minimalist.:

Speaker 2:

33:08

Right? And so flexible you can build whatever you wanted on it, but, but it was contingent on the users to, to build and make it valuable. And so I think a lot of users, especially when the market got bigger and they needed to grow beyond sort of the, the core technical and they, you know, they're publicly traded and now that they're expected to have billions of users instead of millions, um, you know, once you get outside of that segment of the users on the platform are just not capable of, of doing those more technical things to create community. And so people would get on there and they're like, there's nothing going on here. It's like, no because you kind of hacked together your own community and um, and, and build these little, little pockets of high value. But it was, it was all on the user, it was, it was definitely not provided by the platform. Um, so that's. Yeah. And, and they were slow to facebook, kind of had a similar problem, but they, they were quick to embrace, you know, images and video and that kind of content were. And, and help the users to create content with their actual application and twitter never built those tools on it. So:

Speaker 4:

34:13

what I like about twitter though to that point by the way, and I don't like about facebook like, so there's no platform in the world that you will hear me tell you how much I hate more than facebook. So like I literally everything about it and we should do, we should for therapy for me, bro, we should do a whole show just on how much I hate facebook and why? Because there's actually some really good reasons for a marketing perspective, a social perspective, a cultural perspective, why we should all work together to murder facebook. Do that. That's definitely. That's cool. We should do more topics like that. Yeah, but so, but the thing I do like about twitter is that twitter is more about being a public personality, right? So it forces people to be more clever, to be better with their content, to share smarter things than facebook does.:

Speaker 4:

34:56

What? Facebook is just a whiny echo chamber of like, you know, have the worst Thanksgiving table, dinner conversation you've ever had in your entire life. So I think, you know, I do like that about twitter and, and from a content perspective you will find better content. I'm on twitter. The only thing I'll say in addition to this training that I want to hear about about gifs and memes from you is on the inverse of that. And I thought I would never say this by the way, linkedin is making like a savage comeback, particularly for for B to b marketer. So for whatever reason, more people like bill and I both thought that that linkedin is a ghost town, right? People will use it to house their resume and to find a job, but it seems to me that they've managed to pull people in and to use it more.:

Speaker 4:

35:39

I think actually I think the nature of twitter and facebook for business people is drove them to linkedin as almost a respite from like the political commentary, the, you know, the social commentary, all that kind of stuff. I just want to learn about my job and linkedin and starting to facilitate that and their ad platform has grown leaps and bounds, whether it's inmail or you know, some of the same targeting practices that, that facebook has, but, but more on the B to b side. And so we're actually seeing a lot of good success. I'm from trying a bunch of different tactics in Linkedin for our B to b clients. And so if you're a B to b type of company, I would recommend that you start paying a little bit more attention to your linkedin presence, the content you share there and how you're sharing it totally to particularly, particularly groups focus on linkedin groups.:

Speaker 4:

36:21

Uh, I Iran a test not too long ago for one of our clients. They're, you know, groups on facebook are good too for marketing by the way, the only way to get organic content kind of moving around facebook. But on Linkedin in particular, you know, people are always looking. Business folks are always looking for that silver bullet and while it doesn't exist, they hang out in these groups, like desperately searching for it. And you have to give you something close to it, then you're gonna you're gonna be able to engage people you never thought you'd be able to engage before, by the way. So pay attention. Okay.:

Speaker 2:

36:49

Yeah. And it's kind of funny because they're, they're almost mirror images, facebook and linkedin because I'm seeing the kind of the same dynamic on facebook groups are becoming far more important again for organic movement of content. So I'm all right, I'm gonna. I'm gonna drop my trend since we kinda went through. I think kind of an interesting piece there. We'll, we'll talk about gifts some other time, but I want to go into my recommendation because I want to step on your toes for a second. Um, so my top recommendation or anti recommendation is evernote. This is an application that I want to love, but I just can't. I can't tell you how much I've tried and I've used it for years and it's just always so frustrating. And you can dump stuff. I know you can dump stuff in there but I can't get anything out of it. And just A. Anyway, I've been playing around with Google. Keep, so if there's any sort of recommendations, maybe that's a little bit there and they've changed it a lot. So. Um, so what do you think evernote? Google, why do you.:

Speaker 4:

37:49

I've never used Google keep, but the one thing that the founder of evernote said, and I don't know if it just happens to work this way for me, is that it's a mirror image of your brain and so I have a, like you both us. I've had a lot of different projects from my farm projects to agricultural things I'm doing to work stuff to my writing projects to whatever else and no other piece of software other than evernote have I ever been able to without thinking about it, go into my search mechanism and find exactly what I'm looking for. Every once in a while I'm a little frustrated by that, but for the most part when I searched across all my different notebooks and all my different notes know and everything else that I have in there, it finds me what I want and I really started to enjoy the new clipping functionality and all that kind of stuff.:

Speaker 4:

38:35

I will say this just as a like a really nitpicky thing to your point, it's hard to get stuff out of it. So like, so if you're working in evernote then that's what it is. It's just a giant notepad. It's also hard to add stuff to it. So like one of the things I love to do and I write and I know you do the same thing as I go read a lot like the to make sure a that my opinion's not wacky or B, I'm not covering ground that's already been covered. You cannot take a like a web clipping and then put it into an existing note. It just creates a new one. I'm all done. I've got like 20 notes that I've got to run through and Kinda baggery and into one that's really frustrating. But other than that it is definitely my brain inside of this little piece of software and that's why I dig it and I blame you because you made me a, an evernote of Angeles, so, so fine. Don't use everyday. It is a unit. The only thing:

Speaker 2:

39:23

that kind of keeps me going back there is I can use it offline, which I find myself in that condition more than probably I should, but, and now that's becoming less and less so google keep is kind of interesting because I use google docs for everything else. Um, and one thing that I'm finding useful there is just to kind of put stuff in there and then you can actually convert it to a google doc so at the point in time that you're actually ready to produce something, you can keep all your notes in there and then all of a sudden you, you know, kick it over and it becomes a google doc and then you start writing or whatever you're going to do there. So that's kind of been been what's keeping me there a little bit, but it has some of the same problems like organization to like heavily reliant on the search.:

Speaker 2:

40:04

But at some point you kind of do want some organization in there and uh, it's, it's Kinda hard to do that. It's hard to do that in Google drive. It's hard to do that box or dropbox or any of these kinds of solutions. Ever note my ever note and that's probably where I'm, they probably could figure this out because I think I'm not alone here at some point you kind of figure out how you want to use evernote or how you want to organize it and then you just want to blow it up and kind of at that point right now where things are organized in such a way that like, it's frustrating when I go in. They're like, well, where am I going to start? I don't know. I just want to blow it all up. It's overwhelming.:

Speaker 4:

40:38

You got it. Yell to undertake the grand reorganization. Just go ahead and do that. And it's been so therapeutic for Ebr. I do it all the time.:

Speaker 2:

40:44

I'll have to try that. All right. We have definitely gone long today. Um, we're going to save some of our topics and rapid recommendations for next time, but we're going to wrap this one up and uh, this has been fun. I'm kind of excited going through these things. It lets us think out loud. Um, but as always, we want your feedback, we want your comments. Um, so, uh, do those on all your favorite platforms, itunes, stitcher, soundcloud. I think we're on spotify now. So, uh, anyway, throw them in there and we'd love to hear from you. Until next time, this is episode six, cs.: